My first attempt at DV

[fmctm1sw]

My neighbor told me she had some tapes she wanted converted and that they were "just like mine." So I assumed they were 8mm. I get home and on my desk lays a DV camcorder with two mini DV tapes That's great, I didn't even have a IEEE-1394 card. So instead of giving it right back, I went and coughed up $50 for a card and associated cable. I installed it in about 5 minutes and it worked perfectly. I connected it up and used windv to start a capture. It has dropped 1 frame (at the beginning) and it's been running about an hour now. I downloaded the panasonic DV codec and opened a short test file with virtualdub earlier. It can't be this easy can it? I simply upsample the wav file to 48KHZ (it's at 32KHZ right now) and convert it to AC3 with Besweet. Then do the video with TMPGEnc. Is it possible to be jerky without dropping frames? It looks a little jerky to me through the preview window. I got sonic mydvd with it but I guess that doesn't come too highly recommended based on the reviews. Anyone have any words of wisdom for DV? I got the basics I guess...

[Beavis]

Sounds about right. Not sure why your audio is coming across at anything other than 48K, but maybe there's some sort of camera setting your neighbor is using.

[bugster]

Audio. Tell your neighbour to set the camera to use 48khz audio from now. There is no point to using 32khz, I believe it was intended for some form of multi channel which is not available on a camcorder.

Jerky video? Make sure you get the field order correct (bottom field first) and encode as interlaced.

It can't be this easy can it?

Yes it is.

[Steve Stepoway]

Audio. Tell your neighbour to set the camera to use 48khz audio from now. There is no point to using 32khz, I believe it was intended for some form of multi channel which is not available on a camcorder.

Yes, it's for 4 channel (actually 2 stereo pairs) at 12 bits/sample (same data rate as 48kHz stereo at 16 bits) which seems to be popular inJapan. Some camcorders default to this setting. The in-camera audio is recorded on 1 pair, with music/FX added later on the other. Don't confuse it with anything decent like 5.1.

[Richard_G]

If the camcorder is a Sony (and probably a few other makes too), it will have a menu setting for 12 bit or 16 bit audio. Set it at 12 bit and you'll get 32kHz audio, change to 16 bit and you'll get 48 kHz so no need to upsample. As the footage has already been shot, you can't change it now, but you can set it so anything in the future will be correct.

[guns1inger]

12bit is often the default audio for long play as well. . . . .

[vhelp]

Sounds about right. Not sure why your audio is coming across at anything other than 48K, but maybe there's some sort of camera setting your neighbor is using.

I believe that most dv cams are defaulted to 32k ..and I don't know why
..though there must be a stupid reason for it ..on my TRV22, it was set
to 12 bits (aka, 32k) So, I'd set it to 16 bit - 48k for your friend, and just
remind him/her that if something happens later (ie, battery dead etc) that
she/he remembers to change the audio to 16 bit - 48k.. that's it
(remember to show them how)

My guess is that the owner of this cam didn't know any better, ..just picked up
the cam and started shooting video (as any other casual user would have
done as well) :P
.
So, the only thing you can do, is up to 48k and do the best you can in getting
the best sound from a 32k to 48k upsampling.., not that its' gonna matter
anyhow though :P

-vhelp 2555

[mikesbytes]

You can still run 16bit in long play